Industry

Employees

Location

Use Case

Products Used

Why New Relic

Easy to deploy and use, with robust features such as waterfall charting and easy scripting capabilities.

Highlights

Delivers confidence that all website functionality is working as planned

Identifies issues the company didn’t even know it had

Enables BloomThat to deliver a higher quality customer experience

With New Relic Synthetics, BloomThat Delivers on its Customer Promise

BloomThat founders created the company with the vision of providing a better, faster, and easier alternative to current online flower industry offerings. Available exclusively through its website and iOS app, BloomThat delivers better-looking bouquets, with same-day delivery by bicycle, often within 90 minutes. The company is backed by investors that include: SV Angel, Ashton Kutcher, A-Grade Investments, Joe Montana, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, and others.

“Every time New Relic comes out with something new, we find problems we didn’t even know we had.”

Kevin Klein
Vice President of Engineering

Creating a frictionless customer experience

BloomThat uses technology to solve the non-technical problem of sending a fresh, local flower bouquet with minimal hassle, high quality, and same-day delivery. To take as much friction out of the ordering process as possible, BloomThat’s vice president of engineering, Kevin Klein, began looking for a way to go beyond reactive monitoring of the website.

“While New Relic® Browser™ gives us great insight into what users are experiencing in real time, we also wanted to be even more proactive,” says Klein. “We want to know if something in production is broken before someone actually experiences it.” Klein knew he wanted to generate synthetic traffic to the website to continually test all the processes on the site and considered coding the capability in house. “Frankly, it was far too much effort to create a synthetic monitoring tool from scratch,” said Klein. “When I heard about New Relic Synthetics™ at the FutureStack conference, I knew it would be perfect for us and couldn’t wait to try it out.”

Finding problems beforecustomers do

Klein reports that the installation took all of five minutes and that the team immediately discovered a number of areas on which to concentrate their performance improvement efforts. “New Relic Synthetics is exactly what we thought it would be,” says Klein. “It’s perfect. It’s giving us incredible data that we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

An example of the new insight is when the BloomThat team used New Relic Synthetics to discover that its SSL negotiation was taking up almost three-quarters of the load time. “Thanks to New Relic Synthetics, we quickly changed CDNs and moved things around,” says Klein. “We were able to bring the load time down from about 500 milliseconds to about 20 milliseconds.”

While still in the early stages of a two-phase project that includes redoing the entire front-end and checkout process, Klein already appreciates the scripted browser, auto-complete feature in the scripting tool, and waterfall charting features of the product. “Waterfall charting is mind blowing,” says Klein. “We now have multiple locations giving us a waterfall of how things are loading plus the actual user data, too. We actually had one image that was 2.5 megs on the home page and no one noticed it, but we saw that with the waterfall.”

“Thanks to New Relic Synthetics …We were able to bring the load time down from about 500 milliseconds to about 20 milliseconds.”

Kevin Klein
Vice President of Engineering

Delivering a fresher, better flowersending experience

“Every time New Relic comes out with something new, we find problems we didn’t even know we had,” says Klein. “Out of the box, New Relic Synthetics identified numerous issues that immediately became priorities for our engineering group.”

“Our main goal is to make sure that everything that our customers should be able to do on our website is actively functioning,” says Klein. “New Relic gives us that information.” Like its flowers, BloomThat’s engineering team is aiming to please customers with a fresh, high-quality experience and New Relic is there to help it meet that goal.